Xem thêm: Hồi ký: Mỹ Lai và những đứa trẻ mồ côi - The Diaries of My Lai Orphan Tran Van Duc
Toàn văn bài viết trên tạp chí LIFE số ra ngày 5-12-1969, lần đầu tiên công bố những hình ảnh do phóng viên ảnh quân đội Mỹ Ronald Haeberle chụp về vụ thảm sát của lính Mỹ tại Mỹ Lai, tỉnh Quảng Ngãi ngày 16-3-1968.
The action at Mylai received only a passing mention at the weekly Saigon briefing in March of 1968. Elements of the Americal Division had made contact with the enemy near Quangngai city and had killed 128 Vietcong. There were a few rumors of civilian deaths, but when the Army looked into them -- a month after the incident -- it found nothing to warrant disciplinary measures. The matter might have ended there except for a former GI, Ron Riddenhour, now a California college student. After hearing about Mylai from former comrades, he wrote letters to congressmen, warning that "something rather dark and bloody " had taken place. Now an officer has been charged with murder of "an unknown number of Oriental human beings" at Mylai, and 24 other men of Company C, First Battalion, 20th Infantry are under investigation. Congressmen are demanding to know what happened at Mylai, who ordered it, and whether or not U.S. troops have committed similar acts in Vietnam.
Because of impending court-martials, the Army will say little. The South Vietnamese government, which has conducted its own investigation, states that Mylai was "an act of war" and that any talk of atrocities is just Vietcong propaganda. This is not true. The pictures shown here by Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer who covered the massacre, and the interviews on the following pages confirm a story of indisputable horror -- the deliberate slaughter of old men, women, children and babies. These eyewitness accounts, by the men of Company C and surviving villagers, indicate that the American troops encountered little if any hostile fire, found virtually no enemy soldiers in the village and suffered only one casualty, apparently a self-inflicted wound. The people of Mylai were simply gunned down.
On the day before their mission the men of Company C met for a briefing after supper. The company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, read the official prepared orders for the assault against Mylai and spoke for about 45 minutes, mostly about the procedures of movement. At least two other companies would also participate. They, like Company C, were elements of Task Force Barker, named for its commander, Lt. Colonel Frank Barker, who was to die in action three months later. But only Company C would actually enter the cluster of huts known as Mylai 4.
"Captain Medina told us that this village was heavily fortified," recalls one of his squad leaders, Sgt. Charles West. "He said it was considered extremely dangerous and he wanted us to be on our toes at all times. He told us there was supposed to be a part of the 98th NVA Regiment and the 48th VC Battalion there. From the intelligence that higher levels had received, he said, this village consisted only of North Vietnamese army, Vietcong, and VC families. He said the order was to destroy Mylai and everything in it."
Captain Medina was a stocky, crew-cut, hard-nosed disciplinarian whom his men called "Mad Dog Medina." Men respected him: to Charles West he was one of "the best officers I've known." Most of them had served under Medina since the company had formed the previous year in Hawaii as C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade.
"As far as I'm concerned, Charlie Company was the best company to ever serve in Vietnam," says West. "Charlie Company was a company, not just a hundred and some men they call a company. We operated together or not at all. We cared about each and every individual and each and every individual's problems. This is the way that we were taught by Captain Medina to feel toward each other. We were like brothers."
Mylai 4 was one of nine hamlets, each designated by a number, which were clustered near the village of Songmy, a name sometimes used also for the hamlets. The men of Company C called the area "Pinkville" because it was colored rose on their military maps and because these fertile coastal plains long had been known as Vietcong territory. Pinkville was only seven miles northeast of the provincial capital of Quangngai, where, during the Tet offensive only a month before, Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops had boldly occupied portions of the city. Soon Company C would use the name Pinkville not only for the entire area but for the single hamlet Mylai 4.
Company C had seen its first real combat in the previous weeks, all of it around Pinkville. A couple of weeks before, sniper fire from across the river had killed one man. His buddies believed the fire had come from Mylai 4. Two weeks before, enemy land mines had killed five men and wounded 22. Several days before, in a hamlet near Mylai 4, a booby trap made from an unexploded artillery shell had killed one of the Gls' favorite squad leaders, Sgt. George Cox.
"I was his assistant squad leader," recalls Charles West. "On the way back to camp I was crying. Everybody was deeply hurt, right up to Captain Medina. Guys were going around kicking sandbags and saying,'Those dirty dogs, those dirty bastards.' "
At the briefing, says West, "Captain Medina told us we might get a chance to revenge the deaths of our fellow GIs. "Afterward the men held a memorial service for George Cox, but the ritual of mourning was more like a pep rally for the forthcoming action.
"Captain Medina didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children," says West. "Nobody told us about handling civilians, because at the time I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians. I think what we heard put fear into a lot of our hearts. We thought we'd run into heavy resistance. He was telling us that here was the enemy, the enemy that had been killing our partners. This was going to be our first real live battle, and we had made up our minds we were going to go in and with whatever means possible wipe them out."
Shortly after sunrise on March 16, 1968, a bright, clear, warm day, the helicopters began lifting approximately 80 men of Company C from the base camp at Landing Zone Dottie and delivering them 11 kilometers away in the paddies west of Mylai 4.
Army Photographer Sgt. Ron Haeberle and SP5 Jay Roberts, both of the 31st Public Information Detachment, came in on the second helicopter lift. Haeberle, who had been drafted out of college, had only a week left on his tour in Vietnam. Neither man had seen much action. They had volunteered for this operation because the word was out that it would be "a hot one." The squad the two were assigned to was getting its orders by walkie-talkie from Captain Medina. Haeberle was carrying three cameras--one for the Army, two of his own. (He turned in his black-and-white film to the Army. The Army took no action at that time but apparently intends to use the film as evidence in the court-martial proceedings.) Roberts, a college student who had volunteered for the draft, took pad and pencil. Their mission was to prepare news releases and report for the brigade newspaper.
"We landed about 9 or 9:30 in a field of elephant grass," says Varnado Simpson, then a 19-year-old assistant platoon leader from Jackson, Miss. Gunships had prepped the area with Miniguns and grenade launchers. It was clear and very warm and it got warmer. "Our landing zone was the outskirts of town, on the left flank. There were about 25 of us and we went directly into the village. There wasn't any enemy fire. We'd come up on a hootch, we'd search it to see if there was someone in it. If there was no one in it, we'd burn it down. We found people in some, and we took some back to the intelligence people for questioning. Some ran, we tried to tell them not to run. There were about 15. Some stopped. About five or six were killed."
Haeberle and Roberts moved through the rice fields toward a hill in back of the village area. Haeberle was with 10 or 15 GIs when he saw a cow and heard shots at the same time. The shooting was straight ahead. A GI shot a cow and then others kept pumping bullets into the cow until the cow finally fell.
"Off to the right," says Haeberle, "a woman's form, a head, appeared from some brush. All the other GIs started firing at her, aiming at her, firing at her over and over again. She had slumped over into one of those things that stick out of the rice paddies so that her head was a propped-up target. There was no attempt to question her or anything. They just kept shooting at her . You could see the bones flying in the air chip by chip. Jay and I, we just shook our heads."
"There were a whole lot of Vietnamese people that I especially liked," recalls Sgt. Charles West of his year in Vietnam. "Most of them were at this orphanage I used to visit frequently after I came off field duty. I'd go down there and the people would try to teach me more of the Vietnamese language and they would explain a lot of customs that I wanted to know something about."
Charles West led his squad of 13 men through the rice paddies and heard the sound of gunfire. They were coming down a sharply winding trail and were keeping a close watch for booby traps. They turned a curve in the trail and there, 25 feet ahead of them, were six Vietnamese, some with baskets, coming toward them. "These people were running into us," he says, "away from us, running every which way. It's hard to distinguish a mama-san from a papa-san when everybody has on black pajamas." He and his squad opened fire with their M16s. Then he and his men kept going down the road toward the sound of the gunfire in the village.
"I had said in my heart already," says West, "and I said in my mind that I would not let Vietnam beat me. I had two accomplishments to make. The first was to serve my government and to accomplish my mission while I was in Vietnam. My second accomplishment was to get back home."
"There was a little boy walking toward us in a daze," says Haeberle. "He'd been shot in the arm and leg. He wasn't crying or making any noise." Haeberle knelt down to photograph the boy. A GI knelt down next to him. "The GI fired three shots into the child. The first shot knocked him back, the second shot lifted him into the air. The third shot put him down and the body fluids came out. The GI just simply got up and walked away. It was a stroboscopic effect. We were so close to him it was blurred."
"The people who ordered it probably didn't think it would look so bad," says Sgt. Michael A. Bernhardt, who asserts he refused to take part in the killings.
As he entered the village, Bernhardt recalls, a plane was circling above, warning the people in Vietnamese to leave. "Leaflets were dropped ahead of time, but that doesn't work with the Vietnamese people. They have very few possessions. The village we went into was a permanent-type village. It had hard walls, tile roofs, hard floors and furniture. The people really had no place to go. The village is about all they have. So they stay and take whatever comes.
"It was point-blank murder. Only a few of us refused. I just told them the hell with this, I'm not doing it. I didn't think this was a law ful order."
"To us they were no civilians," says Varnado Simpson. "They were VC sympathizers. You don't call them civilians. To us they were VC. They showed no ways or means that they wasn't. You don't have any alternatives. You got to do something. If they were VC and got away, then they could turn around and kill you. You're risking your life doing that work. And if someone kills you, those people aren't going to feel sorry for you.
Lt. William Calley Jr.'s platoon was the first to arrive in the center of Mylai. "There was about 40, 45 people that we gathered in the center of the village," ex-Pvt. Paul Meadlo told CBS News. "And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island, right there in the center of the village, I'd say.
"Men, women, children. Babies. And we all huddled them up. We made them squat down, and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, you know what to do with them, don't you? And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about 10 or 15 minutes later, and said how come you ain't killed them yet? And I told him that I didn't think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them. He said, no, I want them dead. He stepped back about 10, 15 feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.
"I fired them on automatic--you just spray the area and so you can't know how many you killed 'cause they were going fast.
"We're rounding up more, and we had about seven or eight people. And we was going to throw them in the hootch, and well, we put them in the hootch and then we dropped a hand grenade down there with them. And somebody holed up in the ravine, and told us to bring them over to the ravine, so we took them back out, and led them over too--and by that time, we already had them over there, and they had about 70, 75 people, all gathered up. So we threw ours in with them and Lieutenant Calley told me, he said, Meadlo, we got another job to do. And so we walked over to the people, and he started pushing them off and started shooting ... off into the ravine. It was a ditch. And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them, so altogether we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. Men, women, and children.
"And babies. And so we started shooting them, and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single shot, and shot a few more rounds."
"There was no expression cn the American faces," says Haeberle."I couldn't believe it. They were destroying everything. They were doing it all very businesslike. The Vietnamese saw the Americans but didn't run. They kept on walking until the GIs saw them and started shooting. Some of the people started pulling their animals off the road and hiding behind trees. The GIs were opening up with M16s, machine guns and grenade launchers. The grenade launcher made a KAPLOW sound."
Pfc. Charles Gruver of Tulsa, Okla., was the first eyewitness to report what he had seen to his old friend Ron Ridenhour, the man who set off the new Army investigation by writing to congressmen. Gruver says he had been in other operations around Mylai, "but we had never killed civilians before. We had never been under orders to wipe things out before."
Gruver told Ridenhour of seeing a small boy, about three or four years old: "The boy was clutching his wounded arm with his other hand while blood trickled between his fingers . He just stood there with big eyes staring around like he didn't under stand. Then the captain's RTO [radio operator] put a burst of 16 [M16] fire- into him."
"On other missions," says Sgt. West, "the GIs would take their fruit and maybe a can of pork and beans and give the rest to the Vietnamese people. I always thought it would be a treat if I could give them my pears or my peaches or something like that. The people seemed like they appreciated it.
"Just about anywhere we went on an operation we always had kids following us, and most of the kids we would know by name. In a lot of cases I could actually say the people were actually looking out for us. Kids would meet us two or three miles outside a village. We didn't have to use our mine-detecting machine to check out the trail because they would run their animals down the trail and walk behind them just to show us, GIs, we don't want to hurt you and we know that you don't want to hurt us.
We would tell the kids to eat the food and bring the cans back and dump them in a large pile. There was a saying that every time we ran into a booby trap, it turned out to be made of a can that we had given to the kids.''
"Just outside the village," says Reporter Jay Roberts, "there was this big pile of bodies. This really tiny little kid--he only had a shirt on, nothing else--he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead. One of the GIs behind me dropped into a kneeling position, 30 meters from this kid, and killed him with a single shot."
"I saw three heaps of bodies about the same size," says Sgt. Bernhardt, "all with about 20 people. Thieu says the people were killed by artillery, which is ridiculous. The shell would have to land dead zero to kill this many people in one spot, and it would have blasted them into the paddies."
Haeberle and Roberts watched while troops accosted a group of women, including a teen-age girl. The girl was about 13 and wearing black pajamas. A GI grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her.
"Let's see what she's made out of," a soldier said.
"VC boom-boom," another said, telling the 13-year-old girl that she was a whore for the Vietcong.
"I'm horny," said a third.
As they were stripping the girl, with bodies and burning huts all around them, the girl's mother tried to help her, scratching and clawing at the soldiers. Another Vietnamese woman, afraid for her own safety, tried to stop the woman from objecting. One soldier kicked the mother in the rear and another slapped her up a bit.
Haeberle jumped in to take a picture of the group of women. The picture(page 37) shows the 13-year-old girl, hiding behind her mother, trying to button the top of her pajamas.
"When they noticed Ron," says Roberts, "they left off and turned away as if everything was normal."
"Then a soldier asked, "Well, what'll we do with 'em?"
"Kill 'em," another answered."
''I heard an M60 go off," says Roberts, "a light machine gun, and when we turned back around, all of them and the kids with them were dead."
"The yanigans were doing most of the shooting," says Charles West. "I call them yanigans because they were running around doing unnecessary shooting. In a lot of cases they weren't even shooting at anything. Some were shooting at the hootches that were already burning, even though there couldn't possibly be anything alive in there.
"The guys were hollering about 'slants.' It wasn't just the young guys, older guys were shooting too. They might have been wild for a while, but I don't think they went crazy. If an individual goes crazy, you can't reason with him. Once everything was secured, everything did cease. If these men had been crazy, they would have gone on killing people.
"Most of the men in our squad were not reacting in a violent way. We were with the command element and Captain Medina was with us. He never would have stood to see us run around like rookies. He would have probably ordered a court-martial right on the spot."
A black GI told Haeberle he couldn't stomach it, he had to get out of there. Later Haeberle and Roberts were sitting near a ditch, a clump of bodies off to the left, when they heard a shot. They hit the ground, thinking it was a sniper. The soldier who had wanted to get out of there had shot himself in the foot with a .45. Accidentally, he said. Captain Medina was calling in a "dust-off," a helicopter, to take him out. "He shot himself purposely to get out of there," says Roberts. "He looked happy even though he'd shot up his own foot."
SP5 John Kinch, who is still on active duty in Vietnam, was the point man for the heavy weapons squad. "We moved into Pinkville and found another stack of bodies in a ditch. It must have been six or seven feet deep and they were level with the top of it. One body, an old man, had a 'C' carved on his chest.
"Captain Medina was right in front of us. Colonel Barker, the task force commander, was overhead in his helicopter. He came through over the radio saying he had got word from the medevac chopper there were bodies lying everywhere and what was going on. I heard Captain Medina tell him, 'I don't know what they are doing. The first platoon's in the lead. I am trying to stop it.'
"Just after that he called the first platoon and said, 'That's enough shooting for today.'
"Colonel Barker called down for a body count and Medina got back on the horn and said, 'I have a body count of 310.'
At 9 a.m. Haeberle and Roberts got into the village itself. On the outskirts they met Captain Medina. Roberts said Medina told him there had been 85 killed in action so far. He also said Company C had taken 20 suspects. One of them, an old man, said many Vietcong had been in the village the night before but had left at dawn.
Huts were being torched with cigarette lighters. One soldier with a 90-pound pack was cutting down cornstalks one by one. Some GIs were going through the civilians' belongings, looking for weapons. One soldier was keeping the civilians' piasters. There were two dead water buffalo and two calves on the ground.
"I know that you've got to destroy the enemy's resources," says Roberts. "It's an old tactic and a good one. Sherman's march to the sea. You've just got to. We saw soldiers drag a body from a hut and throw it in a well to destroy the water supply. They shot and stabbed all the animals, which were, in effect, VC support units."
One soldier was stabbing a calf over and over again. Blood was coming from the calf's nose. The calf tried to move toward the mother cow. The GI was enjoying it and stabbed again with a bayonet which he'd taken off his rifle. Soldiers stood around and watched. Others were killing the baby pigs and all the other cows.
"God," says Roberts, "those cows died hard. They had them in small pens. They'd shoot them--paff, paff, and the cow'd just go moo. Then paff,paff, paff, moo."
A GI was running down a trail, chasing a duck with a knife.
"I saw two military-age males running across the field about 500 meters away," says Charles West. "I yelled,'Dong lai, dong lai,' but neither of them stopped. At this distance we could have killed both of them, but we just fired in the air and then chased them about half a mile. Only one of them lived. The other one was killed by the interrogation unit. Some of the people told the interrogation unit they didn't understand what was being talked about. The men that didn't talk were killed by the Vietnamese that were doing the questioning, not by the Americans. There were, I guess, nine or 10 killed before one of them started talking. I was told that the guys were saying that there had been Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops there and that they had gone toward the ocean by underground tunnels."
Haeberle remembers a hideously small act of compassion. "A GI went up to a little boy who was badly mangled up, and put a blanket over him."
SP4 Larry Colburn was the gunner on a helicopter, flying reconnaissance over the Mylai area. "Outside the village," he recalls, "we saw a VC with a carbine and pack, but he got away. We came back near Mylai and noticed people dead and wounded along the road and all through the village. There was an irrigation ditch full of bodies. We noticed some people were still alive.We didn't know what had happened.
"Our pilot wanted to evacuate some of the wounded, but there was no room in our helicopter, so he called for gunships to help out. We spotted a child.We went down and our crew chief brought out a little boy about 2 years old. He seemed to be in shock.
"About 50 meters away there was a bunker with 10 or 15 people. We called for gunships to help evacuate them while we took the child to a hospital. There must have been 75 or 80 people in a ditch--some dead, some wounded. I had never seen so many people dead in one place before."
Later the helicopter returned and landed in a paddy near Lieutenant Calley's platoon. The pilot got out and motioned for Lieutenant Calley to come over. "The pilot seemed angry," remembers Charles Sledge, Calley's radio operator,''but we couldn't hear what he was saying. Then Lieutenant Calley came back and told us, 'This guy isn't very happy with the way we're running the operation, but I don't care. He's not in charge. "
Charles West's squad saw a little boy about 10 feet away. The boy was crying. He had been shot in the arm and leg--probably the same child Charles Gruver had described.
"Gee," a GI said, "what are we going to do with that kid up there?"
Without reply, says West, a radioman turned, aimed and fired his M16, shooting the little boy through the head. Neither West nor anyone else said anything. They kept going, pushing on, "clearing up," as West calls it.
"That day I was thinking military," says West. "I was thinking about the security of my own men. I said to myself this is a bad thing that all these people had to be killed. But if I was to say that at that time I actually felt a whole lot of sorrow for the people, then I would be lying."
An old papa-san was found hiding. His pants kept coming off. Two GIs dragged him out to be questioned. He was trying to keep his pants on. Captain Medina was doing the questioning. The old man didn't know anything. He rattled something off. Somebody asked Captain Medina what to do with the man, and Jay Roberts heard the captain say, "I don't care."
Captain Medina walked away. Roberts heard a shot and the old man was dead.
In the entire day at Mylai 4, says West, "I can't rightfully say that I got fired upon. I heard shots all the time, but I couldn't tell whether it was our men or an enemy firing upon us. I did hear some guys call on a radio and say they had received sniper fire. They told Captain Medina they were going to try to get in position to zap the sniper. But I heard all that on the radio."
"I remember this man and his two small children, one boy and one girl, kept walking toward us on this trail," says Haeberle. "They just kept walking toward us, you know, very nervously, very afraid, and you could hear the little girl saying,'No, no,' in the Vietnamese tongue. The girl was on the right and the boy was on the left. All of a sudden, the GIs just opened up and cut them down."
Before noon Haeberle and Roberts left by chopper to cover another company and have lunch. Later that day, at another company, Haeberle heard a captain listening to a radio report. The report said 125 Vietcong had been killed. The captain didn't know anything about the incident, but he laughed and said, "Yeah, probably all women and children!"
Later, back at base camp, West talked to Haeberle. "He said he thought there was a whole lot of wrong-doing," recalls West. "He had taken a whole lot of pictures of this. I stressed that I thought it was wrong that people should be walking around taking pictures of this. There were a whole lot of GIs going about taking pictures of dead bodies.
"Most of us felt that we were U.S. government property, which we were and still are. I tried to explain to the men at the time that you can't sit there and blame yourself--you were on orders, you were on a search-and-destroy mission. If anyone was to be blamed or court-martialed, it has to be someone higher than our echelon. Calley and the sergeant shouldn't be tried unless they try every man that was on that operation."
"They captured three weapons [rifles]," says Roberts, "40 rounds of mortar ammo, grenades, web gear.
"We thought about Mylai a lot after we got back to Duchpho. But neither one of us was very much of a banner carrier." When he wrote it up for the brigade newspaper, Roberts says, "I played it up like it was a big success."
"The village was heavily fortified with rice," says West.''They did find documents that there had been NVA and VC troops there. Also they found evidence that these people had been there not too long ago. I understand that they found ammunition and as far as tunnels, I wouldn't know because I checked into some tunnels and I ran into dead ends."
"Eventually we reached the beach," says John Kinch. "We captured four suspects, one kid, one 15 to 27, one 40 to 55 and a girl in her twenties. They were being beaten kind of hard and the kid named the older man as an NVA platoon leader. Medina drew his .38, took out five rounds and played Russian roulette with him. Then he grabbed him by the hair and threw him up against a tree. He fired two shots with a rifle, closer and closer to the guy's head, then aimed straight at him. The guy must have been very scared because he started rapping like hell. He turned out to be an NVA area commander. Then Medina had a picture of himself taken while he drank from a coconut with one hand and held a big sharp knife under the throat of the kid who was gagged and tied to a bamboo.
"When`we got back to LZ Dottie, Captain Medina gave the company a briefing. He said, 'They are running an investigation. As far as anyone knows, we ran into sniper fire and cut loose.' As far as I am concerned there was no sniper fire."
Charles West and his squad stayed in Mylai until about 5 that afternoon. They camped in the same area that night, before moving on to find Vietcong nearer the coast the next day. Some of the men talked about writing their congressmen to protest the action, but they never did. Some were quiet and grim, but not many. "A lot of people knew," Charles West says, "that a lot of people had been killed who didn't have to be killed, but the average GI felt that it was part of our mission. We all wondered where the enemy went. We were all concentrating on finding where they went.
At suppertime they set up bivouac in a little graveyard near Mylai. Children and old papa-sans were hovering nearby. When the GIs opened their C-rations, they shared their supper with these Vietnamese who had survived the massacre.
Toàn văn bài viết trên tạp chí LIFE số ra ngày 5-12-1969, lần đầu tiên công bố những hình ảnh do phóng viên ảnh quân đội Mỹ Ronald Haeberle chụp về vụ thảm sát của lính Mỹ tại Mỹ Lai, tỉnh Quảng Ngãi ngày 16-3-1968.
from LIFE Vol. 67 No. 23
December 5, 1969
Because of impending court-martials, the Army will say little. The South Vietnamese government, which has conducted its own investigation, states that Mylai was "an act of war" and that any talk of atrocities is just Vietcong propaganda. This is not true. The pictures shown here by Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer who covered the massacre, and the interviews on the following pages confirm a story of indisputable horror -- the deliberate slaughter of old men, women, children and babies. These eyewitness accounts, by the men of Company C and surviving villagers, indicate that the American troops encountered little if any hostile fire, found virtually no enemy soldiers in the village and suffered only one casualty, apparently a self-inflicted wound. The people of Mylai were simply gunned down.
On the day before their mission the men of Company C met for a briefing after supper. The company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, read the official prepared orders for the assault against Mylai and spoke for about 45 minutes, mostly about the procedures of movement. At least two other companies would also participate. They, like Company C, were elements of Task Force Barker, named for its commander, Lt. Colonel Frank Barker, who was to die in action three months later. But only Company C would actually enter the cluster of huts known as Mylai 4.
"Captain Medina told us that this village was heavily fortified," recalls one of his squad leaders, Sgt. Charles West. "He said it was considered extremely dangerous and he wanted us to be on our toes at all times. He told us there was supposed to be a part of the 98th NVA Regiment and the 48th VC Battalion there. From the intelligence that higher levels had received, he said, this village consisted only of North Vietnamese army, Vietcong, and VC families. He said the order was to destroy Mylai and everything in it."
Captain Medina was a stocky, crew-cut, hard-nosed disciplinarian whom his men called "Mad Dog Medina." Men respected him: to Charles West he was one of "the best officers I've known." Most of them had served under Medina since the company had formed the previous year in Hawaii as C Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade.
"As far as I'm concerned, Charlie Company was the best company to ever serve in Vietnam," says West. "Charlie Company was a company, not just a hundred and some men they call a company. We operated together or not at all. We cared about each and every individual and each and every individual's problems. This is the way that we were taught by Captain Medina to feel toward each other. We were like brothers."
Mylai 4 was one of nine hamlets, each designated by a number, which were clustered near the village of Songmy, a name sometimes used also for the hamlets. The men of Company C called the area "Pinkville" because it was colored rose on their military maps and because these fertile coastal plains long had been known as Vietcong territory. Pinkville was only seven miles northeast of the provincial capital of Quangngai, where, during the Tet offensive only a month before, Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops had boldly occupied portions of the city. Soon Company C would use the name Pinkville not only for the entire area but for the single hamlet Mylai 4.
Company C had seen its first real combat in the previous weeks, all of it around Pinkville. A couple of weeks before, sniper fire from across the river had killed one man. His buddies believed the fire had come from Mylai 4. Two weeks before, enemy land mines had killed five men and wounded 22. Several days before, in a hamlet near Mylai 4, a booby trap made from an unexploded artillery shell had killed one of the Gls' favorite squad leaders, Sgt. George Cox.
"I was his assistant squad leader," recalls Charles West. "On the way back to camp I was crying. Everybody was deeply hurt, right up to Captain Medina. Guys were going around kicking sandbags and saying,'Those dirty dogs, those dirty bastards.' "
At the briefing, says West, "Captain Medina told us we might get a chance to revenge the deaths of our fellow GIs. "Afterward the men held a memorial service for George Cox, but the ritual of mourning was more like a pep rally for the forthcoming action.
"Captain Medina didn't give an order to go in and kill women or children," says West. "Nobody told us about handling civilians, because at the time I don't think any of us were aware of the fact that we'd run into civilians. I think what we heard put fear into a lot of our hearts. We thought we'd run into heavy resistance. He was telling us that here was the enemy, the enemy that had been killing our partners. This was going to be our first real live battle, and we had made up our minds we were going to go in and with whatever means possible wipe them out."
Shortly after sunrise on March 16, 1968, a bright, clear, warm day, the helicopters began lifting approximately 80 men of Company C from the base camp at Landing Zone Dottie and delivering them 11 kilometers away in the paddies west of Mylai 4.
Army Photographer Sgt. Ron Haeberle and SP5 Jay Roberts, both of the 31st Public Information Detachment, came in on the second helicopter lift. Haeberle, who had been drafted out of college, had only a week left on his tour in Vietnam. Neither man had seen much action. They had volunteered for this operation because the word was out that it would be "a hot one." The squad the two were assigned to was getting its orders by walkie-talkie from Captain Medina. Haeberle was carrying three cameras--one for the Army, two of his own. (He turned in his black-and-white film to the Army. The Army took no action at that time but apparently intends to use the film as evidence in the court-martial proceedings.) Roberts, a college student who had volunteered for the draft, took pad and pencil. Their mission was to prepare news releases and report for the brigade newspaper.
"We landed about 9 or 9:30 in a field of elephant grass," says Varnado Simpson, then a 19-year-old assistant platoon leader from Jackson, Miss. Gunships had prepped the area with Miniguns and grenade launchers. It was clear and very warm and it got warmer. "Our landing zone was the outskirts of town, on the left flank. There were about 25 of us and we went directly into the village. There wasn't any enemy fire. We'd come up on a hootch, we'd search it to see if there was someone in it. If there was no one in it, we'd burn it down. We found people in some, and we took some back to the intelligence people for questioning. Some ran, we tried to tell them not to run. There were about 15. Some stopped. About five or six were killed."
Haeberle and Roberts moved through the rice fields toward a hill in back of the village area. Haeberle was with 10 or 15 GIs when he saw a cow and heard shots at the same time. The shooting was straight ahead. A GI shot a cow and then others kept pumping bullets into the cow until the cow finally fell.
"Off to the right," says Haeberle, "a woman's form, a head, appeared from some brush. All the other GIs started firing at her, aiming at her, firing at her over and over again. She had slumped over into one of those things that stick out of the rice paddies so that her head was a propped-up target. There was no attempt to question her or anything. They just kept shooting at her . You could see the bones flying in the air chip by chip. Jay and I, we just shook our heads."
Charles West led his squad of 13 men through the rice paddies and heard the sound of gunfire. They were coming down a sharply winding trail and were keeping a close watch for booby traps. They turned a curve in the trail and there, 25 feet ahead of them, were six Vietnamese, some with baskets, coming toward them. "These people were running into us," he says, "away from us, running every which way. It's hard to distinguish a mama-san from a papa-san when everybody has on black pajamas." He and his squad opened fire with their M16s. Then he and his men kept going down the road toward the sound of the gunfire in the village.
"I had said in my heart already," says West, "and I said in my mind that I would not let Vietnam beat me. I had two accomplishments to make. The first was to serve my government and to accomplish my mission while I was in Vietnam. My second accomplishment was to get back home."
"There was a little boy walking toward us in a daze," says Haeberle. "He'd been shot in the arm and leg. He wasn't crying or making any noise." Haeberle knelt down to photograph the boy. A GI knelt down next to him. "The GI fired three shots into the child. The first shot knocked him back, the second shot lifted him into the air. The third shot put him down and the body fluids came out. The GI just simply got up and walked away. It was a stroboscopic effect. We were so close to him it was blurred."
"The people who ordered it probably didn't think it would look so bad," says Sgt. Michael A. Bernhardt, who asserts he refused to take part in the killings.
As he entered the village, Bernhardt recalls, a plane was circling above, warning the people in Vietnamese to leave. "Leaflets were dropped ahead of time, but that doesn't work with the Vietnamese people. They have very few possessions. The village we went into was a permanent-type village. It had hard walls, tile roofs, hard floors and furniture. The people really had no place to go. The village is about all they have. So they stay and take whatever comes.
"It was point-blank murder. Only a few of us refused. I just told them the hell with this, I'm not doing it. I didn't think this was a law ful order."
"To us they were no civilians," says Varnado Simpson. "They were VC sympathizers. You don't call them civilians. To us they were VC. They showed no ways or means that they wasn't. You don't have any alternatives. You got to do something. If they were VC and got away, then they could turn around and kill you. You're risking your life doing that work. And if someone kills you, those people aren't going to feel sorry for you.
Lt. William Calley Jr.'s platoon was the first to arrive in the center of Mylai. "There was about 40, 45 people that we gathered in the center of the village," ex-Pvt. Paul Meadlo told CBS News. "And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island, right there in the center of the village, I'd say.
"Men, women, children. Babies. And we all huddled them up. We made them squat down, and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, you know what to do with them, don't you? And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about 10 or 15 minutes later, and said how come you ain't killed them yet? And I told him that I didn't think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them. He said, no, I want them dead. He stepped back about 10, 15 feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.
"I fired them on automatic--you just spray the area and so you can't know how many you killed 'cause they were going fast.
"We're rounding up more, and we had about seven or eight people. And we was going to throw them in the hootch, and well, we put them in the hootch and then we dropped a hand grenade down there with them. And somebody holed up in the ravine, and told us to bring them over to the ravine, so we took them back out, and led them over too--and by that time, we already had them over there, and they had about 70, 75 people, all gathered up. So we threw ours in with them and Lieutenant Calley told me, he said, Meadlo, we got another job to do. And so we walked over to the people, and he started pushing them off and started shooting ... off into the ravine. It was a ditch. And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them, so altogether we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. Men, women, and children.
"And babies. And so we started shooting them, and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single shot, and shot a few more rounds."
"There was no expression cn the American faces," says Haeberle."I couldn't believe it. They were destroying everything. They were doing it all very businesslike. The Vietnamese saw the Americans but didn't run. They kept on walking until the GIs saw them and started shooting. Some of the people started pulling their animals off the road and hiding behind trees. The GIs were opening up with M16s, machine guns and grenade launchers. The grenade launcher made a KAPLOW sound."
Pfc. Charles Gruver of Tulsa, Okla., was the first eyewitness to report what he had seen to his old friend Ron Ridenhour, the man who set off the new Army investigation by writing to congressmen. Gruver says he had been in other operations around Mylai, "but we had never killed civilians before. We had never been under orders to wipe things out before."
Gruver told Ridenhour of seeing a small boy, about three or four years old: "The boy was clutching his wounded arm with his other hand while blood trickled between his fingers . He just stood there with big eyes staring around like he didn't under stand. Then the captain's RTO [radio operator] put a burst of 16 [M16] fire- into him."
"On other missions," says Sgt. West, "the GIs would take their fruit and maybe a can of pork and beans and give the rest to the Vietnamese people. I always thought it would be a treat if I could give them my pears or my peaches or something like that. The people seemed like they appreciated it.
"Just about anywhere we went on an operation we always had kids following us, and most of the kids we would know by name. In a lot of cases I could actually say the people were actually looking out for us. Kids would meet us two or three miles outside a village. We didn't have to use our mine-detecting machine to check out the trail because they would run their animals down the trail and walk behind them just to show us, GIs, we don't want to hurt you and we know that you don't want to hurt us.
We would tell the kids to eat the food and bring the cans back and dump them in a large pile. There was a saying that every time we ran into a booby trap, it turned out to be made of a can that we had given to the kids.''
"Just outside the village," says Reporter Jay Roberts, "there was this big pile of bodies. This really tiny little kid--he only had a shirt on, nothing else--he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead. One of the GIs behind me dropped into a kneeling position, 30 meters from this kid, and killed him with a single shot."
"I saw three heaps of bodies about the same size," says Sgt. Bernhardt, "all with about 20 people. Thieu says the people were killed by artillery, which is ridiculous. The shell would have to land dead zero to kill this many people in one spot, and it would have blasted them into the paddies."
Haeberle and Roberts watched while troops accosted a group of women, including a teen-age girl. The girl was about 13 and wearing black pajamas. A GI grabbed the girl and with the help of others started stripping her.
"Let's see what she's made out of," a soldier said.
"VC boom-boom," another said, telling the 13-year-old girl that she was a whore for the Vietcong.
"I'm horny," said a third.
As they were stripping the girl, with bodies and burning huts all around them, the girl's mother tried to help her, scratching and clawing at the soldiers. Another Vietnamese woman, afraid for her own safety, tried to stop the woman from objecting. One soldier kicked the mother in the rear and another slapped her up a bit.
Haeberle jumped in to take a picture of the group of women. The picture(page 37) shows the 13-year-old girl, hiding behind her mother, trying to button the top of her pajamas.
"When they noticed Ron," says Roberts, "they left off and turned away as if everything was normal."
"Then a soldier asked, "Well, what'll we do with 'em?"
"Kill 'em," another answered."
''I heard an M60 go off," says Roberts, "a light machine gun, and when we turned back around, all of them and the kids with them were dead."
"The yanigans were doing most of the shooting," says Charles West. "I call them yanigans because they were running around doing unnecessary shooting. In a lot of cases they weren't even shooting at anything. Some were shooting at the hootches that were already burning, even though there couldn't possibly be anything alive in there.
"The guys were hollering about 'slants.' It wasn't just the young guys, older guys were shooting too. They might have been wild for a while, but I don't think they went crazy. If an individual goes crazy, you can't reason with him. Once everything was secured, everything did cease. If these men had been crazy, they would have gone on killing people.
"Most of the men in our squad were not reacting in a violent way. We were with the command element and Captain Medina was with us. He never would have stood to see us run around like rookies. He would have probably ordered a court-martial right on the spot."
A black GI told Haeberle he couldn't stomach it, he had to get out of there. Later Haeberle and Roberts were sitting near a ditch, a clump of bodies off to the left, when they heard a shot. They hit the ground, thinking it was a sniper. The soldier who had wanted to get out of there had shot himself in the foot with a .45. Accidentally, he said. Captain Medina was calling in a "dust-off," a helicopter, to take him out. "He shot himself purposely to get out of there," says Roberts. "He looked happy even though he'd shot up his own foot."
SP5 John Kinch, who is still on active duty in Vietnam, was the point man for the heavy weapons squad. "We moved into Pinkville and found another stack of bodies in a ditch. It must have been six or seven feet deep and they were level with the top of it. One body, an old man, had a 'C' carved on his chest.
"Captain Medina was right in front of us. Colonel Barker, the task force commander, was overhead in his helicopter. He came through over the radio saying he had got word from the medevac chopper there were bodies lying everywhere and what was going on. I heard Captain Medina tell him, 'I don't know what they are doing. The first platoon's in the lead. I am trying to stop it.'
"Just after that he called the first platoon and said, 'That's enough shooting for today.'
"Colonel Barker called down for a body count and Medina got back on the horn and said, 'I have a body count of 310.'
At 9 a.m. Haeberle and Roberts got into the village itself. On the outskirts they met Captain Medina. Roberts said Medina told him there had been 85 killed in action so far. He also said Company C had taken 20 suspects. One of them, an old man, said many Vietcong had been in the village the night before but had left at dawn.
Huts were being torched with cigarette lighters. One soldier with a 90-pound pack was cutting down cornstalks one by one. Some GIs were going through the civilians' belongings, looking for weapons. One soldier was keeping the civilians' piasters. There were two dead water buffalo and two calves on the ground.
"I know that you've got to destroy the enemy's resources," says Roberts. "It's an old tactic and a good one. Sherman's march to the sea. You've just got to. We saw soldiers drag a body from a hut and throw it in a well to destroy the water supply. They shot and stabbed all the animals, which were, in effect, VC support units."
One soldier was stabbing a calf over and over again. Blood was coming from the calf's nose. The calf tried to move toward the mother cow. The GI was enjoying it and stabbed again with a bayonet which he'd taken off his rifle. Soldiers stood around and watched. Others were killing the baby pigs and all the other cows.
"God," says Roberts, "those cows died hard. They had them in small pens. They'd shoot them--paff, paff, and the cow'd just go moo. Then paff,paff, paff, moo."
A GI was running down a trail, chasing a duck with a knife.
"I saw two military-age males running across the field about 500 meters away," says Charles West. "I yelled,'Dong lai, dong lai,' but neither of them stopped. At this distance we could have killed both of them, but we just fired in the air and then chased them about half a mile. Only one of them lived. The other one was killed by the interrogation unit. Some of the people told the interrogation unit they didn't understand what was being talked about. The men that didn't talk were killed by the Vietnamese that were doing the questioning, not by the Americans. There were, I guess, nine or 10 killed before one of them started talking. I was told that the guys were saying that there had been Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops there and that they had gone toward the ocean by underground tunnels."
Haeberle remembers a hideously small act of compassion. "A GI went up to a little boy who was badly mangled up, and put a blanket over him."
SP4 Larry Colburn was the gunner on a helicopter, flying reconnaissance over the Mylai area. "Outside the village," he recalls, "we saw a VC with a carbine and pack, but he got away. We came back near Mylai and noticed people dead and wounded along the road and all through the village. There was an irrigation ditch full of bodies. We noticed some people were still alive.We didn't know what had happened.
"Our pilot wanted to evacuate some of the wounded, but there was no room in our helicopter, so he called for gunships to help out. We spotted a child.We went down and our crew chief brought out a little boy about 2 years old. He seemed to be in shock.
"About 50 meters away there was a bunker with 10 or 15 people. We called for gunships to help evacuate them while we took the child to a hospital. There must have been 75 or 80 people in a ditch--some dead, some wounded. I had never seen so many people dead in one place before."
Later the helicopter returned and landed in a paddy near Lieutenant Calley's platoon. The pilot got out and motioned for Lieutenant Calley to come over. "The pilot seemed angry," remembers Charles Sledge, Calley's radio operator,''but we couldn't hear what he was saying. Then Lieutenant Calley came back and told us, 'This guy isn't very happy with the way we're running the operation, but I don't care. He's not in charge. "
Charles West's squad saw a little boy about 10 feet away. The boy was crying. He had been shot in the arm and leg--probably the same child Charles Gruver had described.
"Gee," a GI said, "what are we going to do with that kid up there?"
Without reply, says West, a radioman turned, aimed and fired his M16, shooting the little boy through the head. Neither West nor anyone else said anything. They kept going, pushing on, "clearing up," as West calls it.
"That day I was thinking military," says West. "I was thinking about the security of my own men. I said to myself this is a bad thing that all these people had to be killed. But if I was to say that at that time I actually felt a whole lot of sorrow for the people, then I would be lying."
An old papa-san was found hiding. His pants kept coming off. Two GIs dragged him out to be questioned. He was trying to keep his pants on. Captain Medina was doing the questioning. The old man didn't know anything. He rattled something off. Somebody asked Captain Medina what to do with the man, and Jay Roberts heard the captain say, "I don't care."
Captain Medina walked away. Roberts heard a shot and the old man was dead.
In the entire day at Mylai 4, says West, "I can't rightfully say that I got fired upon. I heard shots all the time, but I couldn't tell whether it was our men or an enemy firing upon us. I did hear some guys call on a radio and say they had received sniper fire. They told Captain Medina they were going to try to get in position to zap the sniper. But I heard all that on the radio."
"I remember this man and his two small children, one boy and one girl, kept walking toward us on this trail," says Haeberle. "They just kept walking toward us, you know, very nervously, very afraid, and you could hear the little girl saying,'No, no,' in the Vietnamese tongue. The girl was on the right and the boy was on the left. All of a sudden, the GIs just opened up and cut them down."
Before noon Haeberle and Roberts left by chopper to cover another company and have lunch. Later that day, at another company, Haeberle heard a captain listening to a radio report. The report said 125 Vietcong had been killed. The captain didn't know anything about the incident, but he laughed and said, "Yeah, probably all women and children!"
Later, back at base camp, West talked to Haeberle. "He said he thought there was a whole lot of wrong-doing," recalls West. "He had taken a whole lot of pictures of this. I stressed that I thought it was wrong that people should be walking around taking pictures of this. There were a whole lot of GIs going about taking pictures of dead bodies.
"Most of us felt that we were U.S. government property, which we were and still are. I tried to explain to the men at the time that you can't sit there and blame yourself--you were on orders, you were on a search-and-destroy mission. If anyone was to be blamed or court-martialed, it has to be someone higher than our echelon. Calley and the sergeant shouldn't be tried unless they try every man that was on that operation."
"They captured three weapons [rifles]," says Roberts, "40 rounds of mortar ammo, grenades, web gear.
"We thought about Mylai a lot after we got back to Duchpho. But neither one of us was very much of a banner carrier." When he wrote it up for the brigade newspaper, Roberts says, "I played it up like it was a big success."
"The village was heavily fortified with rice," says West.''They did find documents that there had been NVA and VC troops there. Also they found evidence that these people had been there not too long ago. I understand that they found ammunition and as far as tunnels, I wouldn't know because I checked into some tunnels and I ran into dead ends."
"Eventually we reached the beach," says John Kinch. "We captured four suspects, one kid, one 15 to 27, one 40 to 55 and a girl in her twenties. They were being beaten kind of hard and the kid named the older man as an NVA platoon leader. Medina drew his .38, took out five rounds and played Russian roulette with him. Then he grabbed him by the hair and threw him up against a tree. He fired two shots with a rifle, closer and closer to the guy's head, then aimed straight at him. The guy must have been very scared because he started rapping like hell. He turned out to be an NVA area commander. Then Medina had a picture of himself taken while he drank from a coconut with one hand and held a big sharp knife under the throat of the kid who was gagged and tied to a bamboo.
"When`we got back to LZ Dottie, Captain Medina gave the company a briefing. He said, 'They are running an investigation. As far as anyone knows, we ran into sniper fire and cut loose.' As far as I am concerned there was no sniper fire."
Charles West and his squad stayed in Mylai until about 5 that afternoon. They camped in the same area that night, before moving on to find Vietcong nearer the coast the next day. Some of the men talked about writing their congressmen to protest the action, but they never did. Some were quiet and grim, but not many. "A lot of people knew," Charles West says, "that a lot of people had been killed who didn't have to be killed, but the average GI felt that it was part of our mission. We all wondered where the enemy went. We were all concentrating on finding where they went.
At suppertime they set up bivouac in a little graveyard near Mylai. Children and old papa-sans were hovering nearby. When the GIs opened their C-rations, they shared their supper with these Vietnamese who had survived the massacre.
